Live reporting that shows where the month is heading

Leading indicators over lagging ones

Cash flow tells you where a business has been. Conversion rate, average booking value, time to win and lead volume tell you where it is going, because they move first and cash flow follows once the deals they represent have already closed. A board or an owner watching only cash flow is always looking at a result that has already happened. Watching the numbers that produce that result is what leaves time to influence it.

Watching lead volume specifically means seeing where a month is going to land while there is still time to act, rather than discovering the answer on the last day of the month when nothing more can be done about it. Having this insight allows a business to pivot advertising spend and marketing activity during the month itself, instead of reacting after it closes.

Cash flow still belongs on the dashboard. The change is in what gets treated as an indicator, and what gets treated as a confirmation, since a business tracking only cash flow is always looking at a historical result, not what produced it.

Granular reporting by site, practitioner and channel

A foggy, group-wide total can hide almost anything. An average booking value holding steady across several sites can mean every site is performing consistently, or it can mean one is doing very well while another is struggling and dragging the average down. Reporting broken down by salesperson, site, practitioner, channel and by individual ad, is what allows the problem to be traced to its actual source, instead of showing up only as a vague dip in a total.

Live and on demand reporting

At two or three sites, live and on-demand reporting is convenient. At six or more it is closer to a necessity, since the number of moving parts a monthly meeting can realistically cover shrinks proportionally as the group grows, leaving more and more of the business effectively unmonitored between one report and the next.

A monthly pack forces every question into the shape of whatever the report's author decided to include, so anything outside that scope means a request, a wait and a follow-up document. Live, interactive reporting lets a genuinely new question get answered the same day it is asked, which changes what kinds of questions people bother asking at all and how quickly a problem gets noticed once it starts.

What this looks like running advertising across several sites

Proper tracking makes it possible to test widely across a serious advertising budget, where the alternative is a generic lead count that says nothing about which creative, which channel or which site that spend is working for. Deciding which direction the budget should move in requires answering questions a blended total simply can't, and that only works if the reporting underneath it is granular enough to keep up with a group running campaigns across several sites, sometimes centrally and sometimes through individual local accounts, at the same time.

Proven across twelve locations

Managing a serious advertising budget across that many sites without this kind of reporting underneath it would have been close to unmanageable, since deciding which practitioner's account deserved more spend, which creative had stopped working and which site needed attention were all questions a generic lead count could never have answered.

This is the same reporting approach built fora group running twelve studios, replacing one enormous spreadsheet with live dashboards granular enough to see performance by studio, by artist, by salesperson, by channel and by individual ad, and to see where the month was heading while there was still time to do something about it.